


Lethe

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amnesia, Drama, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-10-26 03:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17738351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Odds are that Ed's had worse days, but it's hard to be sure, since he can't remember a thing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I… actually dreamed up the premise for this last Sunday (and then wrote the whole thing this week. Like an idiot. Stay tuned).
> 
> The dreaming part is extraordinary for a couple of reasons, though, including that I rarely remember my dreams in the first place, that I basically never dream about fic or FMA or much of anything except work crises and conventions going wrong, and that my unconscious brain somehow found a trope I hadn't written yet. XD
> 
> Speaking of conventions hopefully-not-going-wrong, I'll be at Katsucon this weekend! I even [have a lineup this year](http://tierfal.tumblr.com/post/182719307989/i-knew-there-was-somewhere-i-was-forgetting-to), because I have apparently finally discovered the art of not biting off three times more than I can chew for this con. XD I'm going to be a bit all over the place, but please say hi if you spot me!! ♥
> 
> Anyway, this has… zero scientific basis. But a lot of things in real life have zero scientific basis, and this is a fanfic, so… yeah. :')
> 
> I also want to warn you guys that this one is a bit sadder than most of the usual Tierfal Brand™ content. :(  I tried to keep it fairly hopeful, but please do heed the heads up! The whole thing's written and ready to roll out after an edit, but the rest of the edit, uh, hasn't happened yet. :'| Mea culpa. Cherish the suspense…? X'D

Ed opens his eyes.

Sky.  That’s a start.

Everything fucking hurts, which is also a start, albeit a much less promising one.

“ _Don’t move_!” Al’s voice howls from somewhere off to his right.  “Brother, don’t—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ed says.  He figures blinking doesn’t count.  Blinking can’t count.  “Ow.”

Over some weird settling noises and the thundering of his heartbeat in his head, he can hear the footsteps approaching him at a slightly reckless speed.  The terrain sounds… dusty?  It feels dusty.

He lies as still as he can and stares up at the slight wisp of white cloud in his line of vision.  He listens to himself breathe, which hurts more than it ought to but less than it could.

Where the hell is he?

What the hell was he _doing_?

He doesn’t… know.

He reaches back, reaches down—scrabbles around with his fingernails, tries to scrape every last corner of his memory—

He doesn’t know _anything_.

He knows who he is—knows his name; knows that there’s some sort of drive in him, some sort of core component spurred by a fiery ferocity; a need to do more and do better and build.  He knows he’s never satisfied.  He knows that kills him sometimes; knows that it burns him as much as it buoys him; knows that it keeps him up at night.

He has no idea how many nights that’s been.

He has no idea what he does the rest of the time; no idea where he’s been; no idea how he ended up lying on the probable-dirt staring skyward and waiting for—

Al.  Al he knows.  Al is the sun and the stars and the planets and the cosmic spin of the whole universe; Al is all of the physical forces that hold everything together.  Al is his reason for being.  Al is his reason for being all right.

He feels—all right.  Something about that is strange, and not just because he also happens to be in relatively significant surface-level pain.  He can’t explain it, which… on second thought, isn’t a surprise, since he doesn’t _know_ anything, but there’s some prickling part of him convinced that he shouldn’t feel… settled.  He shouldn’t feel…

“Do _not_ turn your head,” Al says, from very close this time, and then dirt-sand-dust-whatever hisses and skitters as he drops to his knees, and mostly-gentle fingertips start probing at Ed’s collarbones.  They migrate swiftly around to the back of his neck to assess his vertebrae, and he knows all of the names—the medical names of the bones.  He knows Al didn’t used to wear cute little silver-framed glasses.  He knows Al used to cast a bigger shadow, and he sounded—different.  Echoey.

That doesn’t make sense.

“Look at me?” Al says, leaning further over him.  “ _Only_ with your eyes, Ed—okay—”

The penlight hurts enough that Ed wrinkles his nose and has to fight valiantly against an instinct to recoil away from it, but he recognizes it as a normal amount of hurt, or at least a not-dangerous one.  “Jeez.  I’m fine.”

“Stop talking,” Al says.  “You’re fine when I say you’re fine and not a moment before.”  The light flicks back and forth twice more, and Al leans in so close that Ed can count the faint freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose.  He savors doing that.  That much he knows.  “Okay.  I think you may have managed to side-step a concussion this time, Wonder Boy.  You can sit up— _slowly_.  Here, c’mon—”

He knows that having Al’s arm underneath his shoulders and Al’s muttering in his ear feels like home, and his whole chest seizes up at the prospect of doing anything at _all_ to jeopardize that closeness.

Including things like.  Y’know.  Mentioning that he doesn’t have the faintest clue what the fuck is going on.

“Is that okay?” Al asks when Ed’s sitting upright, attempting to gauge the intensity of the pounding of his heart in his head so that he can give an honest answer.  “Hey, talk to me.  If you messed up your speech centers, he’s going to _kill_ me, even though it would probably be a blessing for the rest of us.”

“Damn,” Ed says.  “Rude.”

Al sighs feelingly, but the tenderness with which his hands are darting down Ed’s spine, then up around his head, then sweeping carefully through his dust-encrusted hair tells a rather less-exasperated story.  “Takes one to know one.”

Ed manages to tear his eyes away from Al’s inexplicably fulfilling eyelashes— _eyelashes!_ —and look down.

There is a very battered helmet on the ground beside him.  That probably explains a lot of this.

His right arm—

There should be—silver.  Right?  Something gleaming; something bright.  He lifts his hand slowly; there’s something curious about how light it is, and how easily it responds; he turns it over and flexes his fingers.  His rather tattered leather jacket sleeve slips down, and the thick, white, ropy scars snaking down his wrist—

Something—happened?  The lines are very straight, even if the scars have bubbled and knotted enough to gnarl the edges of the incisions and leave them wavy; somehow he knows that’s normal for a surgical… for…

“Brother?” Al says, and the note of consternation in his voice spears through Ed’s sternum even though Al’s grip on his shoulder doesn’t tighten.  “Are you okay?”

His foremost, paramount priority is reassuring Al.  He’s sure of that one—surer of that one than of anything else.

“’Course I am,” he says.  He can’t look Al in the eyes when he says it, though, or the jig will be up, and Al will panic, and the world will implode around his pain.  Ed glances around them instead.  A mountain bike sprawls on the ground beyond him, laid out at such ungainly angles that it looks like the wreckage of a crash.

That would also explain a lot.

There.  This is fine.  He’s piecing it together.  He wasn’t lying at all; he’s definitely going to be okay.

“Still,” Al says—grudgingly, but he steps back, stands up, brushes himself off, and offers Ed a hand.  Ed tries not to haul too hard on it, but Al doesn’t even seem to notice; just drags Ed right up to his feet and then starts batting a hand at the dust all over his battered jacket.  “I’m calling it.  That’s enough for today.  We’re going to be a little bit late as it is.”

“Sorry,” Ed says, to all of it.

“Hush,” Al says.  He bends and grabs the handlebars of the bike, wrangles it back into a wheel-able configuration, and pushes the grips into Ed’s hands.  That done, he picks up the beleaguered helmet, pats Ed on the back, and starts down the dusty slope towards where a pretty awesome red pickup truck is waiting.  “Just in case you scrambled something we haven’t seen yet, I’m driving.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Ed says.  “You’re such a worrywart.”

Al sticks his tongue out.

Then he jogs the rest of the way down the slope off of the bike track and climbs up onto the back bumper of the truck to catch up a black and red duffel bag, from which he extracts, first, a very large, very jangly keychain; and, second, a smartphone in a red case.  He shoves the helmet into the bag, and then he tosses the phone in Ed’s direction.  “Catch.”

It’s way too easy to sling the weight of the bike into his right hand and snatch the phone out of the air with his left.  Slipping it into his pocket feels natural.  So does saying, “Hey!  You jerk.”

“Reflex test,” Al says, beaming at him.  “You passed.”

Together they lift the bike into the truck bed, and the only logical course of action is to secure it with the yellow canvas straps clearly waiting there for that very purpose, and then…

And then Ed’s sitting in the passenger seat of what is apparently his truck, and Al is driving them fuck-knows-where.

This is going to be fine.

Surely this is going to be fine.

It has to be fine, because he has no idea what the hell he’s going to do if it’s not.

Al rambles companionably about how cool it is that they’re airing footage of the ceremony at all, even if it is at a really rather inconvenient time for most people’s schedules, including those of the people involved, but he supposes TV corporations are just trying to make money, which is really the problem, which is part of what makes the ceremony important, and isn’t that just a nice, thick slice of irony with ice cream on top, and—

“Are you _sure_ you’re okay?” Al asks at the next stoplight.  He reaches out and manages to press the back of his hand to Ed’s forehead, despite Ed’s efforts to bat his arm away.  “It worries me when you’re quiet.”

“It worries you when everything,” Ed says.

“It also worries me when you completely lose your grasp of grammar,” Al says.

“I was bantering,” Ed says.  “I’m _fine_.”

“Okay, okay,” Al says.  The light turns green; he fastens his hand back onto the wheel—ten and two; he drives like a driving instructor.  He always has, hasn’t he?  Was Ed the one who taught him how to drive?  That sounds—right.  Maybe.  It sounds plausible, at least.  Al would have emulated the drivers’ handbook way more than he followed Ed’s example anyway.  “I just… I know that if I tried to stop you, you’d just do the stupid stuff anyway, but it still feels like my responsibility.”

“It’s not,” Ed says.  “You can’t stop stupid.  Nobody can.”

Al grins.  “I’m getting you that on a T-shirt.”

“Better get me two,” Ed says.  “I’ll probably destroy the first one on accident by doing something stupid in it.”

Al laughs.

It’s going to be all right.

Or at least it is until Al pulls up in front of a house that rings no bells whatsoever inside Ed’s cranium—sparks no connections, flips no switches.  There’s a space for this big-ass truck in the driveway next to a clean black hybrid sedan.  Al draws the truck almost up to the garage door, pulls the parking brake, and jumps out; Ed takes the duffel bag out of the truck bed and slings it into the cab, but once that’s done, there’s nothing left to do except to follow Al towards the house.

The lawn’s small, but it’s neat—trimmed pretty recently, by the looks of it.  There’s a little brick-paved walkway up to a sort of a half-porch with a white wicker swing, hung from the eaves in front of a wide window.  The gutters are painted navy blue to trim the roof, and the door is dark red.

None of it’s familiar.

Every time Ed thinks his guts can’t drop any further, they creep a little closer to his boots.

Al hands him his keys back, and he puts them in his pocket on what feels like autopilot—but is it?  Will it pass as normal that he’s hesitating in front of the door to what has to be his own house?  Al opens it like he’s the one that owns the place—maybe he does.  Maybe the black car’s his; maybe—

“Hey, Roy!” Al calls.  “Don’t freak out!”

Ed’s fingers moved up to the deadbolt the moment he closed the door, like they knew what they were doing—but even before a ripple of unfamiliar laughter rolls down the hall towards them; even before steps become a shadow that becomes a figure walking swiftly—

There’s a framed photo on the wall—right here, just inside the door.  It’s him.  It’s him and the man who just turned the corner—the two of them at the beach, with a stark blue sky behind them, with their arms around each other and their hair tangling up in the breeze.  Ed can almost smell the salt in the air, almost feel the sun on his back.

But the man coming towards him—the man who was looking at _him_ in that picture, not at the camera, and smiling like the whole world was in order just this once—is a stranger.

“Oh, Lord,” the man—Roy—says, and his eyes are so soft as they dart up Ed’s face and then back down— “Let me guess—I should see the other guy, which in this case is the track.”  His right hand extends; Ed steels himself not to tense as fingertips very gently graze his cheek.  Ed tries at a smile, tries at relief, tries not to let the cold coil of terror in him show through.  Roy turns to Al.  “Clean bill of health?”

“So far,” Al says, sauntering down the hall towards the room the laughter came from.  “But I’m afraid you’re on concussion duty tonight.”

Ed fights through the knot in his throat.  “I—sorry.”

“I’m not,” Roy says.  He kisses Ed’s forehead like it’s the simplest fucking thing— “Riza and Gracia are already here, and Winry’s fixing that cabinet she decided wasn’t good enough last week.  Jean ran into some traffic.  Did Dr. Elric, M.D. make sure that Dr. Elric, PhD was sufficiently hydrated on the way home?”

Ed’s eighty percent sure that this Roy guy just asked him if Al gave him water.  “Um—I’m okay.”

“All right,” Roy says.  His thumb makes a sweep along a spot on Ed’s jaw where the track bit back, which almost-stings, but it’s not the sharp sliver of pain that puts him on edge.  “I’ll get some hydrogen peroxide for this—go in and sit down.  It’s supposed to be your day off.”

Ed knows two things about this guy:

Roy is drop-dead fucking gorgeous.

And Roy _adores_ him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY, WE'RE BACK. I think I'm alive, but don't quote me on that.
> 
> This really should have all been posted in one go, especially since that's more or less how I wrote it, but since I locked myself into chapters with the first piece, forgive the clunky divisions. XD I recommend just reading through the whole thing at once if you have time!
> 
> P.S. 520cenz drew [**this super super super beautiful rendition of the beach photo**](https://twitter.com/520cenz/status/1095451656165175296) from chapter 1! ;A; Please come cry over it with me!! ♥
> 
> P.P.S. As always, you guys are the best, and I love you all so much. ♥

Roy’s fingertips glide up over Ed’s cheek so lightly that he can almost make himself believe it wasn’t real.  “Take it easy,” Roy says.  “Why don’t you go sit down?”

Ed doesn’t shiver, doesn’t draw back—he steels himself and says, “Okay.”

Roy ghosts off down the hall in the other direction, so he draws a breath and makes his cautious way towards the room where Al went.

There are a number of people he doesn’t recognize sitting on couches and chairs that look like things that he could, conceivably, have decided to own.

“Hey, nerd,” a young woman with long white-blonde hair says from where she’s curled up in Al’s lap with his arm around her waist.  “You teach the track a thing or two?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Ed says despite the fact that his tongue feels buzzingly numb inside his mouth.

“And I don’t want to,” she says.  “Your kitchen’s hinge-screeching days are over, by the way.”

“You’re the best,” he says.  He has no idea where to sit.  Everyone’s smiling at him.  His heart keeps pounding; his head keeps pounding; his throat keeps trying to tighten up.  He leans against the doorway and folds his arms across his chest so that they won’t be able to see the way his hands are shaking.  “Guess you can stay.”

She sticks her tongue out at him, so he sticks his out back, and Al rolls his eyes, and the two pretty women sitting next to them laugh a little.  There’s a girl sitting on their right, around ten or twelve, who’s wearing glasses.  Her feet don’t reach the floor, so she’s swinging them back and forth, and she has one of those cutesy little Polaroid cameras.  She points it at him.

“Say ‘cheese’,” she says.

At this rate, his ribs won’t be strong enough to keep his heart in his chest.

“American?” he asks.  “Or gouda?”

The shutter snaps, and she giggles, and then a brush of a touch against Ed’s arm makes him jump so hard that he’s shocked his skin keeps up.

The brush turns to a soothing sort of stroking motion in an instant.

“Sorry,” Roy says.  His eyes are still soft, but they’re too smart— _way_ too smart.  “Are you sure you’re all right?  It’s not like you not to be raring at the opportunity to mock my pretentiousness.”

“You weren’t _that_ bad,” the indescribably dignified blonde woman on the couch says, crossing her legs.  There’s a little black and white dog curled up on top of one of her feet, so she only moves the other one.  “On a scale of one to your regular amount of pretentiousness, I’d put it at an eight point five.”

“Generous,” Roy says.  His arm slides around Ed’s shoulders; if Ed tenses up—he _can’t_ ; he just has to—pretend that— “I’m just glad I didn’t get booed off the stage.  And there was no rotten fruit.  And they didn’t have a trapdoor.”  He draws Ed over to the couch, and Ed has to time the shift of his weight exactly right so that they can sit down at the same time.  That part’s easier than he expected, but—this couch is so _clean_ ; he shouldn’t be rubbing his filthy jacket all over it, and— “Perhaps we should do a survey at the end and get an average.”

Ed deliberately uncurls his hands where they’ve been trying to clench on top of his knees.  This is normal.  This has to be normal.  _Al’s_ acting like it’s normal; Al wouldn’t let some guy get his paws all over Ed, no matter how gorgeous the guy in question was, unless he knew that Ed enjoyed it.

There are more photographs in here—there’s a fireplace on the far wall with a well-decorated mantelpiece, although he can’t quite make out what fills most of the frames over there.  The larger one next to the TV is a picture of Roy—a much younger Roy—in a nice tuxedo, sandwiched between the brown-haired woman currently sitting on their couch and a man with dark hair and green eyes and square-shaped glasses.

What is Ed supposed to do with his hands?  He tries to lean in a little closer to Roy.  How over-the-top PDA does this guy get on a regular day?  Does Ed just—put up with it, or does he participate?  Does it depend on who’s in the room?

The insipid, very neon-colored commercial that was playing gives way to a lot of fanfare and a title all in calligraphic gold about a philanthropy award ceremony thing.  The specific words won’t process in Ed’s brain at _all_ , because Roy’s arm around him just tightened a fraction, and Roy’s mouth is brushing against his ear.

Roy has a really nice mouth.  He has really nice eyes and a really nice nose and really nice hair, even if there’s a fair bit more gray in it now than there was in any of the pictures Ed’s seen so far.

He also has really nice hands.  The left one just settled on Ed’s knee.  Roy’s third finger has a ring on it.

Ed’s doesn’t.

Roy’s breath is warm against the shell of his ear, and Roy’s arm is warm around him, but he is _so_ fucking cold—

Roy whispers “What’s wrong?”

Ed swallows, swallows again, bites his tongue, sets his teeth.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” he asks, in as low a voice as he can manage and still make himself heard.

Roy’s forehead rests against his temple for a second.  There is so much fucking intimacy in it that Ed’s heart wrings itself like a wet towel, and he doesn’t know—

Anything.  Who he is.  What’s going to happen.  What he’s going to say.

He knows it’s going to hurt.

“Of course,” Roy murmurs, and then he’s sweeping them both up off of the couch again, and gentle fingertips against the small of Ed’s back usher him out of the room—

“Where are you going?” the little girl asks.  “You’re going to miss your own awards thing, Uncle Roy.”

“That’s all right,” Roy says.  “I know what happens.  I was there.”

“Typical,” Winry says.

Ed keeps walking down the hall at what feels like an intermediate pace until Roy’s hand falls away from his back, which probably means that the doorway they just approached is the one Roy expected them to go through.

It’s a bedroom.

It’s _their_ bedroom.

Very, very quietly, Roy closes the door after them before turning to face him.  Roy smiles.  Ed—can _read_ him, can recognize the subtle uncertainty in Roy’s eyes and expression; a part of him thrums with a desperate sort of empathy, but—

He can’t waste any more time.

It’s not right.  It’s not _fair_.  Not to someone who treats him like this.

He grinds his teeth for a second and then squares his shoulders.  He’ll get through this.  Some fragment of him knows that he’s gotten through worse.

Roy wouldn’t—kick him out.  Would he?  Roy wouldn’t be _angry_ , wouldn’t—retaliate, wouldn’t—

It doesn’t matter.  It’s too late.  It’s a miracle that he got this far faking it, and he just… can’t.  He can’t do any more.

“I’m not okay,” Ed says.

Roy’s eyes widen, and his mouth twists, and he’s just so—

He _cares_ so much—

Ed has to get through this; he has to push through this part.

“I hit my head,” he says.  “Earlier.  Which I guess—it sounds like that’s—normal, but—”

A very slowly-dawning sort of horror seeps into Roy’s distress.

Ed swallows, breathes, hikes up his shoulders like there’s anywhere to hide.  He looks at the wall, which is cowardly as shit, but at least it’s bearable.

“I don’t remember anything,” he says.  The rest of it fights him on the way up—tooth and nail and claw and hook and serrated knives.  “I don’t remember—you.”

The silence fucking _burns_ —like acid, not like fire; almost an itching at the very start, but then it’s eating through your skin—

He risks a glance.

Roy is standing very still just two steps in from the doorway.

“You—” Roy says.

Then he hesitates.

Ed does not know how to quantify the caliber of pain on Roy’s face in that instant.  There might not be any measure of it.  There might not be mathematical units broad and deep and cruel enough.

“You wouldn’t joke about that,” Roy says.

Revelation is supposed to be beautiful.

Isn’t that right?

“I don’t think I would,” Ed says.  “I—know I’m not right now.”

Roy lifts his right hand, looks at it, sees that it’s trembling, and runs it through his hair.  He drops it again.  He looks—smaller.  The set of his shoulders changed.

Ed did this.  Whatever his intentions; whatever the cause—

The next words stick, too, with a thousand little edges like a thousand little knives.  “I’m—sorry.  I’m—really sorry.  I’m—I don’t—”

Roy tilts his head back, presses his lips together, and closes his eyes.  He doesn’t move for a dozen heartbeats; they come so quick that Ed’s almost dizzy, but that’s still too many—still too long.

“I knew who Al was,” Ed says, helplessly.  “Not—details, or anything.  Just who he was to me.  But that’s it.  The rest of it is—just—gone.”

Roy breathes deeply and lets it out slow.  He pushes the heel of his right hand across each of his eyes in turn, and it comes away gleaming.

Ed’s mind is a roaring white blank, and his chest cavity is a giant black vacuum, and six or seven half-formed thoughts are tangled in his throat.  He didn’t want—but he can’t just _lie_ ; pretending wasn’t helping, and—

“Brains are weird,” he chokes out.  “They’re—so fucking weird.  Maybe it’ll—maybe everything will come back.”

Roy smiles at him.  Still so fucking genuine; still so fucking _warm_ , even with the shining lines of water thickening on his eyelids until he blinks, and they spill.  He swipes his palm across one cheek and then the other.

“Maybe,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Ed says again.  It feels like those are the only words in the language that are left.  They hurt, and they’re hollow, but they’re the best he’s got.

“It’s not your fault,” Roy says.

“Yes, it is,” Ed says, and when it’s out in the open, he realizes that it’s true.  “If I hadn’t—if I wasn’t so fucking reckless, out there on a stupid _bike_ when I could’ve been—I dunno, here, with _you_ —I don’t know why I wouldn’t’ve fucking picked that twelve times out of ten, anyway; I—I mean—just fucking _look_ at you.”

Roy’s face contorts, but he tries to extract a shaky smile from it.  “Thank you.  I… think.”

Ed wants to sit down on the bed so he doesn’t have to try to get his knees to hold him anymore, but he’s an intruder in this house.  “I don’t… I don’t know—what to do.”

Roy looks down at his hands, turns them over, flexes the fingers, and then twines them together.

“Neither do I,” he says, so softly that if Ed hadn’t seen his lips move, he wouldn’t be sure that Roy had said anything at all.

Another fucking “I’m sorry” tears out of Ed’s throat, fragmented by the way his voice tries to shake.  “I—shit.  Who—am I?  Who are we to—each other?”

He’s not sure which answer he’s more scared of.  Might as well get them both at once.  Maybe this will end a few seconds sooner if he clumps together a couple of the worst parts.

Roy takes another breath and puts his hands into his pockets.  He looks at Ed and then away—at the wall, at the window, at the half-dozen other photos on the dresser of the two of them together, smiling like not a second of it was for show.

“You were a developmental biologist,” Roy says.  “While you were working on your doctorate, you filed six patents for medical devices that were just… unreal.  Unbelievable.  So _smart_ , so much cleverer and more convenient and more cost-effective than anything else out there.  I was in marketing at a pharmaceutical company, and I heard you speak at a conference.  I—went back to the office, pulled my best friend away from her desk, and said ‘We’re quitting.  There’s something else we have to do.’  That was Riza—she’s on the couch right now.  The one who copes with my pretentiousness even at an eight point five.  She runs the company, and I run the foundation.  We put the profits back into research support, and charity outreach, and… it’s… it matters.  It’s wonderful.”

Ed senses that there’s more to it than that—that it runs deeper; that it means more.

He swallows.  “How’d I go from that to almost breaking my neck on a stupid bike?”

Roy smiles slightly.  “You found success very boring, so you tried it as a hobby.  Naturally, you got good enough to compete professionally and collect several sponsorships.  Gave the vast majority of that to charity, too.”

“Jesus,” Ed says.  “What am I trying to make up for?”

Roy looks—wounded.  Shaken, maybe.

Ed needs to change the subject, but the only other topic that he has in mind is worse.

Putting it off won’t make it any less necessary.  He tries to brace himself.

“What about us?” he says.

Roy breathes in.

Roy breathes out.

Roy crosses past him to the bed, sits down on the edge, and drops his head into both hands.

Ed listens to his own heart beating in his ears for a second to make sure it’s still running, and he’s still alive.

“We’ve been married for two and a half years,” Roy says.  “The… best two and a half years of my life.  I—hell.  I’m—sorry.  I know it’s—”

It occurs to Ed that they’ve probably been the best two and a half years of his life, too.

It occurs to him that he wouldn’t want to lose or damage the symbol of those two and a half years when he was out there being stupid on his two-wheeled concussion machine.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his keys.  There’s a big key fob with buttons on it for the truck.  There are three smaller silver keys that probably unlock different doors around this house.  There are a couple others—Al’s place, maybe?  Storage?  He doesn’t know.

There’s a little red carabiner hanging off the side.  Dangling from it is a silver ring.

He unhooks it and slides it onto the third finger of his left hand.

Fits.  Fits perfectly.

“Shit,” he says, and even he’s surprised by how much that one hurts.

Roy hasn’t raised his head yet.  “That… just about sums it up.”

Ed looks at him.  Roy told that story—if two lifetimes summed up in a couple of sentences can be called a _story_ at all—like Ed was the hero of it, and the only part that mattered.  Roy made his own role in it sound like something of an afterthought.

But Ed knows that he’s not easy—he senses that much.  He’s not easy to deal with, or talk to, or keep up with once he starts thinking out loud.  And he knows he’s _really_ not easy to love.

He could see it, in some of the pictures—the disbelief in his own expressions.  The depth of the gratitude.

Roy told that story like Roy himself was the lucky one.

Ed knows that’s wrong.

He hesitates a second, and then he moves—slowly—to sit down on the bed next to Roy.

Roy loves him.

If it had been the other way around—if Roy had taken that header earlier today; if Roy had gambled with the vagaries of the human brain and lost—

Would Roy still have remembered him?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Local author does not understand how chapters work. More at eleven.

Ed twists his hands together in his lap, looking at the ring.  The distance in between them feels like a fucking gulf to _him_ —he can only imagine what it’s like for Roy right now.

“Hey,” he says.  Tear off the band-aids.  Rip every single one away, and then maybe— _maybe_ —something exposed to the air will start to heal.

Right?  Is that how it works?  For the love of—anything, anyone, whatever might be out there— _please_ —

“Roy,” he says, rolling it around in his mouth.  It’s settling in his head faster than it ought to, isn’t it?  There’s something there—a magnetism.  There’s a space carved out for it where it fits.  “What’s your last name?”

Roy takes another sudden breath.  He holds it for a few seconds, raising his head as he lets it out—still looking at the closet door opposite, not at Ed.

“Legally,” Roy says, “Elric-Mustang, but my business cards still just say ‘Mustang’.  It’s a lot easier to sign.  And then I’m not tempted to make the dot of the _I_ a little heart on contractual documents.”

Ed nibbles on the inside of his bottom lip for a second.  “How’d you decide on the order?”

Roy smiles faintly.  At the closet, obviously, but Ed’s watching as closely as he can.  “Alphabetical.”

“ _Really_?” Ed says.  “That’s a dumbass rationale for such an importa—” Roy’s face just crumpled again.  “Shit.  Christ.  I’m—sorry.  That was—”

“That was exactly what you said in the office of the county clerk,” Roy says, “in what I would not have called your ‘inside voice’.”

The flush that ignites Ed’s face distracts him from his recent resolution not to say anything else of comparable stupidity.  “God.  Are you sure you want me back?  Apparently I’m fucking embarrassing.”

“You are no such thing,” Roy says, “and never have been.  I’ve been… surrounded by liars most of my life.  You call things as you see them.  I admire that.  You’re a _genius_ —and more important even than that, you’re the most generous person I’ve ever met.  I couldn’t be embarrassed of you if I tried.”

Ed’s throat does another weird, unhelpful twisting thing.  He honestly can’t imagine living up to that.

“Besides which,” Roy says, in a tone of calculated casualness that’s probably meant to help, “the look on the clerk’s face when you said that made me laugh so hard that I actually thought you were going to have to take me to the hospital after we’d finished signing the paperwork.”

“Jeez,” Ed says, clenching his fingers tighter around each other.  “Can’t believe I married someone with such a lousy sense of humor.”

“I can’t believe you did either,” Roy says.  “Which is why I always carry evidence.”

He withdraws his phone from his pocket, taps the button on the side to wake the screen, and holds it out.

It’s them again—of course it is; this house is _overflowing_ with the photographic proof of just how much—

This one has them both in black tuxes, wrapped up together.  Roy has his hair slicked back and his arm slung around Ed’s shoulders, and the photographer caught him in the process of leaning in to kiss Ed’s cheek.  Ed’s laughing.  White flower petals litter the table in front of them, and there’s a red rose corsage pinned to Ed’s lapel.

They look so damn delighted that it makes him smile, but it’s—

Someone else’s happiness.  Someone else’s _life_.

Ed had allowed himself a little wisp of hope that it might spark something—that he might tip over into such a depth of feeling in one of these thousand photographs that it would awaken the recollections that should come with them.

He wants to.  He wants to so _bad_ —

Roy must see it, because he pulls the phone back and stows it in his pocket again.  “I’m—sorry,” he says, yet again, but somehow it stings differently every single time.  “I’m—I don’t mean to make this any harder for you.”

“For _me_?” Ed says.  “I don’t have any context.  You’re the one—” It sears his throat on the way up.  Tastes like ashes.  “You’re the one who’s lost everything.”

Roy closes his eyes and forces another fraction of a smile.  “Still—”

“There are little things,” Ed says.  “That are—sort of instinctual.  It might—it might come back.”

Roy looks at him, levelly.  “It might.”

Band-aids.  There are fucking band-aids all over the floor, crinkled up and halfway stuck together like so many dying spiders.  What’s one more?

“What do you—what do you think we should do?” Ed asks.  “If it—doesn’t.”

“You’re getting an MRI,” Roy says, gazing at the wall again.  He’s started turning his ring around on his finger with the other hand.  Is that a normal nervous habit, or is this the first time he’s ever reached for it for comfort like this?  “Beyond that… I don’t know.”  He gestures, vaguely.  “This is… your house.  This is your life.  I don’t know…”

Ed shouldn’t say it—that’s on the limited list of things he knows.  He shouldn’t even _think_ it, let alone give it voice.  He has no damn right.

Fuck it.

He chokes down the knot and goes for broke.

“If it doesn’t come back,” he says, “do you think you can fall in love with me again?”

Roy looks at him again, and there is so much fucking _longing_ in it that Ed’s heart skitters, stutters, and squeezes tight.

“Well,” Roy says.  “I’ve fallen in love with you every single day since we first met.  How hard can it be to do it one more time?”

The original knot settles down, pays a mortgage, and multiplies.  “Have you always been this sappy, or did you lull me into a false sense of security until it was too late to run?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

One of the baby knots wriggles up Ed’s throat and emerges as a weak, shaky sort of laugh.  “Devious.”

“I try,” Roy says.  He stands and brushes at a wrinkle in his shirt.  Gorgeous hands.  Gorgeous human being.  “Al’s an excellent physician, but neurology isn’t his specialty.  We should really go get you a brain scan or five.”

Ed hesitates, caught in the thrall of a strange sort of shiver.  “Do I—hate hospitals?”

“‘Hate’ is a strong word,” Roy says.  “Despite the time devoted to medical device development, you don’t have the most favorable history with your own doctors, and receiving injections is not your favorite pastime.”

“Sure sounds like I hate hospitals,” Ed says.

“This is a golden opportunity to give them a second chance,” Roy says.

Ed feels—

Gutted.  Like a fish split open on the cutting board, entrails spilling out hot.

He doesn’t want to give shit second chances—doesn’t want to have to find out what he’s afraid of all over again; doesn’t want to have to scrape and scrabble for something, _anything_ , that feels familiar in the desperate hope of chasing some of that agony back out of Roy’s eyes.  Has anyone in the world ever been more pleased to see another person than Roy was when he walked through that door?  And now—

“I guess so,” he says, getting up.  It’ll probably be less-hard for both of them if he just sucks it up and sticks it out.  “So—we can just…” A thought ripples into clarity in his head.  “Wait.  Between being a doctor and just bein’ _Al_ —he’s a fucking meddler, isn’t he?  He’s gonna take one look at me and know that it’s… that there’s something…”

“I’ll handle it,” Roy says.  “He can always tell when you’re lying, but he’s still got about a fifty-fifty polygraph track record with me.”

“Okay,” Ed says.  He almost hesitates, but the rest of it comes out so naturally that he can’t bite it back: “I trust you.”

Roy looks at him.

“What?” Ed says.  “I do.  You know what you’re doing, and you know _me_ , and… you haven’t given me any reason not to.”

“Well, then,” Roy says, too briskly.  “I suppose we’d better go.”

Roy turns towards the door, stops, hesitates, and then turns back to look at Ed again.  There are way too many things shifting in his expression for Ed to be able to pinpoint any of them, let alone figure out what conclusions to draw from the data set.

“I—sorry,” Roy says, which he needs to stop doing, preferably immediately.  “Do you mind if—could I—”

He makes a completely unhelpful sort of gesture in Ed’s direction, but it doesn’t really matter.  Whatever the fuck he wants, Ed wants to give it to him, if it’ll stop him for a single second from having to look like _that_.

Roy crosses to him, and he won’t tense up; he _won’t_ —

Roy hesitates again just in front of him—with two spare inches left between them; close enough that Ed can feel his body heat—and looks him in the eyes.

Roy looks so fucking lost.  It hurts.  It _hurts_.

Ed nods to whatever the fuck it is Roy’s trying to ask silently.  He doesn’t care what it is.  He’ll do it.

Roy closes the distance, leans in, and wraps both arms around him.

Ed’s too surprised to catch his breath, and then it’s useless to try—Roy holds him _so_ tight, so _desperately_ ; Roy presses his face into the side of Ed’s neck, buries his right hand in Ed’s hair, clenches his fingers, curls in around him—

Roy is drowning.

Ed did this to him.  Intentionally or not, he _did_ this.

Roy drags in a shuddering breath, clings just a fraction tighter, and then lets go.  He steps back.  He raises his head, squares his shoulders, and forces a smile.

“All right,” he says, which it absolutely isn’t, which it is the _opposite_ of, but— “Let’s go bullshit your brother.  I do so love roulette.”

Ed follows him into the hall, feeling like a fucking gnat.  “Really?”

“No,” Roy says.  “Poker, though.  And blackjack.”  As they approach the living room, he pauses, turns, and holds his left arm out halfway, partly curved.  He keeps his voice so low that Ed can barely hear it.  “Is it all right if I—?”

Words are evading every one of Ed’s attempts to skewer them and pin them into place, so he just fits himself in under Roy’s arm and hopes that that’s answer enough.

It feels nice.  It feels comfortable and cozy and reassuring.  It feels like all the things he can’t give back.

Roy knocks on the wall with his free hand to garner everyone’s attention, and Ed sets his jaw and tries to look… what?  Normal?  He doesn’t know what normal _is_.

“Dr. Elric is feeling a bit dizzy,” Roy says.  “We’re going to pop over to the ER so that he can criticize the specialists’ methodology until they release him, partly just so that he’ll leave them alone.”

Winry snickers.  “Give ’em hell, Ed.”  She glances towards the little girl further down the couch, and her eyes widen.  “Uh—shoot—I mean—give ’em heck.”

“Give ’em the ol’ razzle-dazzle,” Al says, but despite the idle, neutral tone of his voice, his eyes are still sharp, perceptive, and firmly trained on Ed and Roy.

This is supremely weird.  Ed doesn’t know _anything_ , but somehow this moment feels inevitable.

“You’re missing your _own_ party, Uncle Roy,” the girl with the glasses says, working up to a serious pout.

“I know,” Roy says.  “But there are a lot of things in life that are more important, and Ed’s pretty little head is one of them.”  Ed hopes—and strongly suspects—that staring at him in a combination of horror, disgust, and dismay is in-character.  “Don’t give me that, darling,” Roy says, which substantiates his theory.  “It’s a valuable head, and it is indisputably pretty.  I don’t make the rules.  Elicia, you do have to promise me that you’ll help eat all of these snacks so that they don’t go to waste.  Deal?”

“Deal!” she says.

“Ahem,” the woman seated next to her says, but she’s hiding a smile, and Roy’s very gently tugging Ed towards the front door, and…

And that’s that.

Ed waits until they’re partway down the front walk and keeps his voice low before the: “Would I really do that?  Harass the ER docs, I mean.”

“No,” Roy says.  He beeps the locks on the sedan.  “But your brother can’t process any other inputs the moment Winry starts to laugh.  Distraction is the only way to keep him off the scent.”

Ed swallows.  “I’m—going to have to tell him.  About this.  Eventually.  Right?  I’m going to have to tell a lot of people.”  He swallows again, harder.  “If it—doesn’t come back, I mean.  It might.”

Roy says, very softly, “It might.”

Ed takes a deep breath.

Then he grimaces.

“Where do I keep my wallet?” he asks.

“When you’re biking,” Roy says, tilting his head towards the truck, “in the duffel bag.”

“Shit,” Ed says.  It occurs to him, in a distant sort of way, that maybe he should watch his language, but Roy just… doesn’t even really seem to hear it.  “Okay.”

He climbs up into the cab of the truck, hikes the duffel bag up onto the passenger seat, and starts checking pockets at random. In the long-run, a randomized search is a significantly less-effective method, but it’s hard to come up with a better plan with his head is spinning so damn violently—not with vertigo from the fall, though, or at least that’s not what it feels like; with the sheer weight of all of the things he doesn’t know or have or understand.

He’s only just starting to be able to wrap his brain around the enormity of all of the things that have been taken away from him.  He’s only just starting to make out the shadowy silhouette of the incredible things he _had._

His wallet’s red, too.

He inhales, exhales, jumps down, closes the door, and follows Roy over to the sedan.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
> 
> ……………………on second thought, despite being one of my favorite little emoticon guys, that is………… really not fitting for this fic. :x

He sits down.  Roy starts the car.  Since it’s a hybrid, it doesn’t any damn noise, which is vaguely disconcerting.  Roy starts to reach out to put his arm around the back of the passenger seat in order to look over his shoulder out the back windshield, pauses, and angles his elbow to keep his arm closer to his side, out of Ed’s space.

Shit.  Fuck.  _Fucker_.

“How far is it to the ER?” Ed manages.

“Not far at all,” Roy says, guiding them out onto the street.  “That was one of my conditions when we were looking for a house.”

“Jeez,” Ed says.  “Am I _that_ much of a disaster?”

“Not the word I’d use,” Roy says, with another one of those terrible ghosts of a smile.  “You’re… a bit unlucky.”

Ed grinds through it one more time.  “Well—I’m sorry.  About—all of it.  And pulling you away like this.  And for draggin’ you to the ER with me one more time.”

“It’s all right,” Roy says.  He flicks his blinker, looks both ways, pulls out onto a cross-street.  “I usually get to see you in a hospital gown, so it’s not a total loss.”

The forced lightness of his tone is starting to make Ed’s chest ache, but it’s probably better than any of the alternatives.  “ _Really_?  Shit.  You got any other weird fetishes I should know about?”

“A vast collection,” Roy says.  “But I probably shouldn’t regale you while I’m driving.”

“How did you do that?” Ed asks.

Roy glances at him—flick-quick, and then his eyes return to the road.  “Do what?”

“Make the word ‘regale’ sound like a euphemism,” Ed says.  “Is that linguistically legal?”

“They can’t arrest me if they never catch me,” Roy says.

“How many states you got warrants in now?” Ed asks.

“At least three,” Roy says.  “I’m not sure if the one in North Carolina ever got filed.”

“There’s a handcuffs joke in here,” Ed says.

“That’s definitely on the list,” Roy says.  He pauses, and not just because he’s glancing in his mirrors again as he makes another turn.  “Which is… probably all that I should say about that, in the interests of not making you uncomfortable.”

“ _Me_?” Ed says.

“Unless there’s another cute blond behind you,” Roy says.  “I… think it’s a bit… ill-considered… to be coming on to you, given the circumstances.”

“Do you always flirt with people you’re married to?” Ed asks.

“Hard to say,” Roy says.  “For the sample size of one, yes.  I actually find it more fun when it’s not necessary.  I think it took you a while to come around on that one, which is… perfectly fair, to be honest.”

“Wait,” Ed says.  “When did we get together?  It sounds like it had to be way…” The words lock up in his throat again and then tumble loose.  “… _way_ long ago.  When—?”

“Officially?” Roy asks.  “Or… otherwise?”

Ed eyes him even though Roy’s still watching the road.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well,” Roy says, very delicately, but with the slightest hint of a devilish grin; “there was… an afternoon, very early, at our fledgling corporate office, where you and I were arguing passionately about the contracts we’d been working on, and… the sexual tension got the better of us.”

Ed upgrades from eyeing to outright staring.  “It—what?  No.  _No_.  We fucked?  In your _office_?”

“In the middle of the day,” Roy says, more than a little bit dreamily.  “With people around.”

Ed’s face catches fire.  This is a three-alarm and no goddamn mistake.  “Holy shit.  We—on your _desk_?”

“Mostly the chair,” Roy says.  “It was… an experience.”

“I’ll fucking bet,” Ed says.  “Hang on—I’m moving that up to the top of my list of shit to remember.  But—that’s the ‘otherwise’.  So what—”

“You avoided me completely,” Roy says, “except for a few rather terse emails, for a week and a half.  Then you turned up at my apartment with a very large box of my favorite type of Sees Candy—a variety that you hate, no less—and said you were sorry for acting like an animal in a number of different ways, and asked me if I would like to go out to dinner that weekend.”

“What is it?” Ed asks.

Roy’s eyes are on the next stoplight, and then they dart towards the left-side mirror.  He’s managed to smooth every angle of his body towards casualness, but his hands are too tight around the wheel.  “Beg pardon?”

“The candy,” Ed says.  “Which kind is your favorite?”

“Their café au lait truffle,” Roy says.  “It’s divine.”

“Eew,” Ed says.

The corners of Roy’s mouth quirk upward.  “Aptly put.  Well.  In any case, before I’d gathered enough wherewithal to say anything—I think I was planning to ask you how you’d gotten my address first, and then figure out what to do with the rest—you told me that I had to take the candy regardless of whether I wanted to go to dinner or not, because you couldn’t spend another second in the company of a box full of abominations masquerading as chocolate.”

“Jesus,” Ed says.  “Didn’t know I was a poet, too.  How do I find the time?”

“You’ve bent stubborner things to your will than the time-space continuum,” Roy says.  The sharpening note of wistfulness in it doesn’t quite crystallize before he moves briskly on: “After that, of course I said I’d be delighted, and made a not-especially-subtle allusion to dessert, and you laughed in my face immediately before giving me an absolutely _ungodly_ smolder of a look and then turning on your heel and walking directly back to your car.  Naturally, after that, I had to do you one better to defend my chocolates’ honor, so I turned up on Saturday with _your_ favorite chocolates, two dozen roses, and four heart-shaped balloons.  Your brother cried laughing.  I think you were considering going for a knife, but then you got distracted trying to make sure he wasn’t dying, and in the end we had a lovely evening.”

“I can’t believe I scored like this,” Ed says.  “You’re smart _and_ nice _and_ a total fucking knockout.  And funny.  What the fuck?  Did I trick you?  Were there bribes involved?”

“More on my side than yours, I think,” Roy says, smiling slightly.  “We… didn’t get along quite as well at the start.  We were both very concerned about messing up the company—me from a financial standpoint, and you from an ideological one, which… got in the way.  And you’re so—open, so utterly and unrepentantly _yourself_ , so willing to speak your mind and cope with the consequences and admit later that you were wrong… It took me a long time to train myself to meet you halfway.  And then on the other side of that, I was traveling all the time trying to sell the products and get the business off the ground, and you were… you had some… abandonment issues… that you hadn’t… worked on, shall we say; and neither of us knew how to isolate that as the problem.”

Despite how shitty that sounds, there’s something weirdly comforting about knowing it wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows from the get-go.  There’s something reassuring about knowing that this—whatever bullshit this is, right now; whatever happened; whatever happens next—won’t be the first thing they’ve fought together to overcome. 

“Ouch,” Ed says.  “Um—okay.  Did I get all jealous?  Fuck.  Don’t answer that.  I bet I was _intolerable_.  Am I still intolerable?  What changed?”

“Your brother got sick,” Roy says, very quietly.  “He… long story short—we can get to that one later, if you like, but it might be better to let him tell it—he’s immunocompromised, and he caught a bug that rather rapidly progressed into pneumonia, and he was in the ICU for several days.  It was a wake-up call for both of us—as far as who we wanted to be, and how we wanted to live, and how little time we really have with other people in the span of a lifetime.  About what a colossal waste it is to spend that time bickering—that sort of thing.  But it was also… an opportunity.  To be there for each other.”  He clears his throat.  “In addition, once your brother was out of the ICU and allowed to have multiple visitors for an extended period, he sat us down in his hospital room and forced us to have an improvised couples’ therapy session, so… we cleared up a couple of things at that point.”

“He would,” Ed says.  “He fucking _would_.”

“It worked out for the best,” Roy says.  “Don’t tell him I said that.”

“I’ll die first,” Ed says.

Roy smiles a shade more genuinely.  “As will I.  But it—well.  It was over the course of that conversation that I realized that I was going to ask you to marry me, so in all honesty, he should get some of the credit.  It—your—perhaps he should tell this story, too.  But—your father left.  The two of you were both very young at the time, and then your mother died shortly thereafter, and… I had always suspected that it had poisoned the concept of long-term relationships for you, but it was only when we talked it out that I really realized… that it wasn’t… me.  Up until then, I’d thought that the contention had to be a result of one of my innumerable personal failings, but Al brought us to the point of understanding that most of our problems were based in both of us caring about each other _too_ much.  I had a tendency to try to steer your decisions towards things I thought were safer for you, which drove you to the brink of homicide on more than one occasion; and the precedent that your father had set in your life had left you terrified that you weren’t enough as a partner to keep me around.  That had _never_ occurred to me—that you could be anything less than the epitome of desirability—so I’d always thought that you had to be trying to tie me down or push me away or both, and… well.  The point is—we got there.  And we committed to the concept of giving each other the benefit of the doubt, and asking questions before jumping into accusations.  And that changed _everything_.”

Ed wants to know.

He wants to know every last damn detail; wants to relive every single second—wants to hear it all in Roy’s words, Roy’s voice, with Roy’s feelings surging underneath like an underground river—like a hot spring, gently steaming, warming every single word of it all the way through—

“So it—” 

But Roy’s starting to look—tired.  Ragged.  This is getting to him; this is getting _through_ him.  It’s wearing down his resolve to try to put up a brave face and a strong front for Ed’s benefit.  If that’s not love at its absolute fucking finest, what is?

Ed doesn’t have much to offer in return at this point, but whatever he’s got, he’ll give it.

He reels back, bites his tongue, and swallows down the curiosity.  It rankles, but in a way that he thinks feels vaguely gratifying.  “Never mind.  Shit.  I mean—we don’t—have to talk about this.”

“I don’t mind,” Roy says.

“Bullshit,” Ed says.

Another trace of a grin—thin, faint, faded, like an afterimage—crosses Roy’s face.  “You have always had such a talent for seeing through me.”

“Why the hell would I want to do that?” Ed asks.  “You’re much hotter opaque than transparent.”

“Good heavens,” Roy says.  “I’m blushing.”

“No, you’re not,” Ed says.

“Case in point,” Roy says.  “And it’s—I mean that.  I don’t… mind.  It’s… good.  Well—perhaps ‘good’ is a bit much, but it’s—there is something rewarding about revisiting all of this from the outside to try to explain it, and… seeing how much we got _right_.”

“That’s part of what’s pissing me off,” Ed says.  “I don’t want a second chance at all of this.  It looks like the first one was perfect.  You’re not supposed to get second chances when you didn’t fuck the first one up.”

“They’re supposed to be a blessing,” Roy says quietly, and they’ve passed a big, obnoxious neon sign, and he’s turning into a parking lot.  To their right is a building that exemplifies what a cost-cutting architect in the eighties thought a hospital should look like.  “Not…”

“This,” Ed says.

Roy takes a deep breath, pulls them neatly into a space, pulls the parking brake, and kills the engine.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALL RIGHT, that's all she wrote! I apologize for the fact that it's not what I would call "a super-satisfying resolution". :'| I winged it with this all the way through. Hope you guys enjoyed it, in any case! There is… more stuff on the horizon. Stay tuned. ♥

He looks over.  Neither of them moves to unbuckle their seatbelts or get out of the car.

“I don’t get it,” Ed manages.  “I just don’t _get_ it.  Like—I know what they’re gonna do.  MRI.  CT scan.  Maybe order a PET scan or an angiogram if they find something.  But I don’t… I reach for something specific, something that’s _mine_ , and it’s just—it’s not there.  Nothing’s there.  _I’m_ not there.  But I _know_ stuff.”

“You’re still you,” Roy says softly.  “The same you that you were yesterday, as far as I can tell.  You haven’t… gone anywhere.”

He doesn’t say _You haven’t died_.  He doesn’t say _That’s what I was afraid of_.  He doesn’t say _That’s what’s making this bearable, or almost bearable, or close enough_.

Ed’s got a knack for hearing what gets swallowed by Roy’s silences.  That doesn’t make sense, either, but he’ll take it.

He also hears that they’re both thinking the same thing—that the deep, dark well opened underneath them at the same time.

Sudden and severe memory loss isn’t ordinarily a disease.  It’s much more likely to be a symptom of something else—something bigger.  Something worse.

“I want to be that person again,” Ed says.  “I fucking _want_ to.  I hope—you know that.  I want to be—what you remember.  I want—”

“It might come back,” Roy says, and his voice wobbles slightly, and his smile wobbles a lot.  “Like you said.  Let’s—see how it goes.  How’s that?”

Ed wants to reach out and touch him, but it’d be weird.  It might be unwelcome.  He doesn’t know where he’d start anyway—cheek, jaw, mouth, hair, shoulder?  He _should_ know.  He should know the best places; he should know the weak spots, the warm spots, the soft ones; he should know all the secrets.  He should know Roy the way Roy knows him.

He did, two hours ago.  He was so fucking _lucky_ then.  Did he know?  Did he recognize it?  Did he wake up every morning with a _Thank you_ for the universe hovering just above his lips?

“Sounds like a plan,” he says.  Roy turns, reaches for the door; he steels himself and does the same.  “Jeez,” he says as they start walking, two inches too far apart.  “I hope this doesn’t take all damn day.  You think they’re going to hit me with the whole kitchen sink?  How good is our insurance?”

Roy levels a new look on him, with a hint of a reprimand.  “Even if it wasn’t excellent—which it is—the monetary cost of—”

“I know, I know,” Ed says.  The door to the ER is not getting any further away, and the back of his neck is prickling ever more insistently in answer.  “Or—I mean—I don’t, but—if we can afford to have a house and give a lot away, I sort of assumed.  Mathematically, y’know.”

“We’ve been extremely fortunate in a lot of ways,” Roy says.  His voice takes on such a luxurious gentle quality—like velvet, or silk; soft _and_ smooth, every time he says something like that.  You can tell he fucking means it.  “To the extent that we were able to help your brother and Winry get the house next door, which—”

“Are you serious?” Ed asks.  “That’s—disgusting.  And adorable.  Disgustadorable.  Adisgustingable.  A lot of things.”

The half-breath that leaves Roy now is the closest thing Ed’s heard to a laugh from him since this started.  “All of those.”

Ed wants to _be_ here.  He wants to be the self Roy recognizes; the person Roy fucking loves so much it keeps overwhelming him.  He wants to earn this.  He wants to be a part of it, be real, be _long_.

He reaches into the back of his own head one more time—if he rifles through the dreck back there for long enough, if he rips into it hard enough, if he just _tears it apart_ , there has to be something.  There has to be some _trace_.

He bites his lip, focuses his eyes on the block letters up above the doors on the building ahead of them, and concentrates as furiously as he’s capable of.  Roy keeps saying he’s smart—keeps saying he’s some kind of genius.  If that’s true, surely his brain can generate a whole hell of a lot of power; surely he can turn up a _piece_.  Just one.  Just a flicker.  Just a handhold.  Just enough to go on.  Just enough to give Roy a tiny bit of hope.

He rummages.

He scours.

He searches.

He _tries_.

Nothing.

Not a single fucking thing.

To hell with it.  He’ll just—keep trying.  He’ll keep digging.  Eventually something’s got to give.

The glass doors split in the center and slide open on either side with a touch of a rattle, but Roy wouldn’t have let them buy a house near a _mediocre_ ER, so Ed’s just going to trust that this place devotes their budget towards patients, not the décor.

There are two pairs of people waiting ahead of them at the check-in desk.  Ed can’t see the first people, because the second set is a mother and a little girl who can’t be more than six or seven, who’s clutching her left arm to her chest and quietly crying her eyes out.

“It’s _okay_ , sweetie,” the mom is saying, sounding more than a little harried.  She touches the top of the girl’s head and then fishes out her phone. “I’m not mad. Nobody’s going to be mad. I just need to tell your father that he has to pick Jason up from soccer practice, okay?”

The girl, who is looking assiduously at the floor as she continues weeping, manages a huge, miserable sniffle.

“Hey,” Ed says in what he hopes is an unintimidating voice as he and Roy step into the line.  He crouches down a little to get closer to her eye level, which feels… weirdly validating.  He’s not sure what that’s about.  “That looks rough.  You mind if I ask what happened?”

The girl sniffles again, somehow even louder.  She’s going to give herself a headache to go with the fracture.  “F-fell off my b-b-bike.”

“Oh, man,” Ed says.  “No kidding?  Me too.”  He gives Roy a rather broad sidelong glance and then cups his hand next to the side of his mouth to stage-whisper, “I don’t think it was the first time.”

Roy is gazing down with so much rueful fondness that it’s difficult to look at him directly.  “Definitely not.”

“Oops,” Ed says.  He sneaks a glance at the mom, and she’s smiling slightly in between the bouts of frantic texting, so he figures he’s in decent shape here.  “Are you left-handed?”

The girl shakes her head.  Her bottom lip is wobbling at a slightly slower rate than it was a second ago.

“Well, hey,” Ed says.  “That’s good.  That means that the minute they put the cast on, you can start drawing cool stuff on it.  What do you like?”

The girl looks at him for a long moment before she says, “D-dragons.”

“Holy cow,” Ed says.  “We’re practically the same person.  We should be best friends.  Dragons are my _favorite_.  How cool would it be if you did one right here—” He points to his own left wrist.  “—and had the wings go all the way around?”

Her eyes light up a little.  The tears are slowing, although they haven’t stopped.  “That’d—that’s c-cool.”

The first pair of people shuffles out of the way and off towards one of the plastic benches on the opposite side of the room.  The mom reaches down to stroke her daughter’s hair.  “We’re next, sweetie.”

“Good luck,” Ed says.  “If I see you later, I’ll draw you something cool, okay?”

The girl manages a smile, and he fakes his best one back.

It doesn’t take long for the nurse at the desk to sign her in, and then she waves at Ed—gingerly, with her right hand, just for a second before she wraps it around her injured arm again—as her mother shepherds her off towards the plastic seats.  He gives her a thumbs up.

Then he has to face the music.

He doesn’t really know what kind of music he likes, but he’s damn sure this ain’t it.

The nurse at the desk glances up at them and clicks her pen.  “Hi, there.  What’s going on?”

Ed plants his feet so that he won’t shift his weight.  “I, um.”  Will this sound as absurd as it feels?  He pulls a card plastered with a little cross-shaped logo and an insurance-company-sounding name out of his wallet and slides it across the desk.  “Head trauma, and… major long-term memory loss.  I guess.”

The nurse catches up his card and clicks her pen again.  “How major?”

Ed swallows.  “Everything.”

The look turns into a stare, and then the stare turns into a wince.  “You…”

“I mean,” Ed says, trying not to give in to the sensation that he’s falling and grab on to the desk, “I remember my name.  And my brother’s name.  And that he’s my brother.  But that’s—that’s about it.”

She blinks.  “I—okay.”  She ducks down to do a bit of scribbling on a form, then looks up again.  “Any family history of stroke or brain cancer?”

Ed wonders if he has a history of cardiovascular cataclysms, because it sure fucking feels like his heart stops.  He turns—helplessly—to Roy.

Roy settles one hand very gently on his shoulder and says, “Significant incidence of leukemia on his mother’s side.  Father’s side is a bit of a question mark, but as far as we know…”

Ed bites down on the inside of his lip so that he won’t ask, won’t agonize—

Never mind.  Too late for not agonizing.

Roy said Al has a weak immune system.

Roy said their mother died young.

Roy said—

“I’ll call up to neurology,” the nurse says.  “See if I can get you in for a consult pretty quick, okay?”  She pushes his card back towards him.  “Sit tight for a minute.”

“Thank you,” Ed says.  There isn’t much else he can think of to say.

Roy’s arm rises again, and Roy’s hand almost flattens itself against Ed’s shoulder blade—but then he withdraws it, and lowers his arm, and releases a breath.

“Sorry,” Ed says.

That one was bigger than a number of the others.  The stakes are higher.  This could get—worse.  Just when he dared to hope they’d hit rock bottom, a cavern’s opened underneath the pit they’re in.

“Don’t be,” Roy says softly.  “None of this is your doing.  None of it’s your fault.”

“It is so,” Ed says, keeping his voice down so that the poor kid over there still struggling through her first ER visit won’t hear his agitation.  “And it’s—I can’t—you’re the one who has to carry most of this.  You’re dealing with _way_ more than I am, and I can’t even… help.  Because I’m not—who you need.  Not really.  Not anymore.”

At the last second, he realizes that—on the off-chance that there’s another cavern underneath the first one—he shouldn’t drop into the plastic chair he’s chosen from the row of seats they reached.  He’s shaken his brain around enough for one day.  He sits carefully instead, even though it’s so much less dramatic.

Roy sits down next to him and waits for him to stop glaring at his boots.  Reluctantly, Ed looks up into the way-too-beautiful eyes.  They’re the safest part of this place.

“Ed,” Roy says.  “I didn’t marry you for your memories. I don’t love you for your personal history, or your diplomas, or any of the accomplishments. I’m here for you. That hasn’t changed.  And it won’t unless you want it to.”

Ed’s throat coalesces into one giant esophageal Gordian knot.  “I don’t deserve you.”

Roy looks at him, half-smiling one more time.  “How do you know?”

Ed opens his mouth.

He shuts it.

“Shit,” he says.  “Touché.  I—just—what if it’s—bad?”

“Then it’s bad,” Roy says softly.  “And we’ll deal with it.”

Ed looks down at Roy’s hand curled around the edge of the plastic chair.  He’s holding it together for Ed’s sake.  He’s holding it together because one of them has to, and Ed doesn’t really remember how.

Ed reaches over and nudges his hand at Roy’s.

Roy’s fingers wrap around his.  Roy hangs on _tight_.

“I’ve got you,” Roy says.  “Whatever happens.  All right?”

Ed squeezes Roy’s hand.  Roy squeezes back.

“All right,” Ed says, which it isn’t, but—maybe—

Maybe it will be.  It could.  It might.


End file.
